Hindsight is 20/20

March 24, 2004

A lot of the focus — both blog and mainstream — on the Richard Clarke book and 9/11 commission is on whether or not we took _Al Qaeda_ seriously enough before 9/11. My gut feeling is that we didn’t. We ignored a lot of warning signs and we let a lot of opportunities slip by. I remember when the Taliban took control in Afghanistan. My mother was reading about them in the paper and what they were doing to the women. She said “these people are going to be trouble.” And they were.

My mother is not often wrong. But she’s not the President.

What concerns me much more than the question of whether or not we did what we should have done to prevent 9/11 is whether or not we did what we should have done in response. Now, I know Republicans are supposed to be the masters of security, but from where I sit it looks like things are not going well. In fact, it looks to me like Osama Bin Laden has managed to taunt us into punching the tar baby. I think I’d like to see a more intelligent, more _nuanced_ approach to dismantling terrorist associations than cowboy-strutting around our allies and bombing/occupying countries that we think might kind of be sympathetic to terrorist organizations. I’d like to see us wage intelligent intellectual and cultural war against terrorism.

That Bush turned what should have been a new kind of war against a nebulous, de-centered enemy into one of bombing traditional states is what bothers me. I understand that some people think by bombing states we’re bombing the cash resources. But that strikes me as a very expensive, time consuming and dangerous one-pronged approach, and one that’s likely to create more terrorists than people sympathetic to us. Instead of that, I wish Bush had chosen to weaken terrorist recruiting by addressing people’s economic and human rights needs rather than bolster them by creating even more bombed impoverished who have so little to lose driving car-bombs.

The idea that Bush never intended to do this — that his first thought was to pin the crime on Iraq, damn the evidence, is weakens my (admittedly rather weak) confidence in his ability to solve this issue. The fact that he can’t admit mistakes, but continues to lie about what actually occurred and slander anyone who disagrees with him completely vaporizes what little confidence I had left. That so many Republicans continue to back him in the face of a mountain of evidence that the Bush approach is having not only having no effect but is actually having a detrimental effect suggests to me that the Republican leadership, in general, is living in a fantasy world and is therefore incapable of dealing with genuine, real-world threats.

Yes, I’m sure we did stuff wrong before and I wish both sides would take more responsibility.

But what really concerns me is what we did _after_.

Posted in Politics, War